Literary Birthday – 27 July – Bharati Mukherjee

Happy Birthday, Bharati Mukherjee, born 27 July 1940.

Nine Quotes

Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.
I’m very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don’t really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It’s about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.
What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?
I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, ‘Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.’
Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise.
As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.
The world is divided between those who stay and those who leave.
Through my fiction, I make mainstream readers see the new Americans as complex human beings, not as just ‘The Other’.
Humour’s the hardest thing to translate.

Bharati Mukherjee is an Indian-born American writer. In addition to writing numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, Mukherjee taught at McGill University, Skidmore College, Queens College, and City University of New York before joining Berkeley. She is the author of Jasmine.